Piaggio turned its cute follow robot into a Star Wars droid

Since 2017, the Vespa-maker Piaggio's Fast Forward division has been exploring a unique way to cut down on car trips: Building robots that can follow you around and carry your stuff. We called it [...]

OpenAI's house of cards seems primed to collapse

OpenAI is in a far less commanding position than it was following the public release of ChatGPT a few short years ago. Back in 2022, the sudden popularity of ChatGPT sent Google into a panic. The com [...]

Lego's latest educational kit seeks to teach AI as part of computer science, not to build a chatbot

Last week at CES, Lego introduced its new Smart Play system, with a tech-packed Smart Brick that can recognize and interact with sets and minifigures. It was unexpected and delightful to see Lego come [...]

Anthropic researchers teach language models to fine-tune themselves

Researchers working with AI company Anthropic have developed a new method called Internal Coherence Maximization (ICM) that fine-tunes language models using only their own outputs. The approach could [...]

Zhipu AI's GLM-Image uses "semantic tokens" to teach AI the difference between a face and a font

Zhipu AI's new open image model combines an autoregressive language model with a diffusion decoder. The 16-billion-parameter model is designed to excel at rendering text in images and handling kn [...]

Rabbit plots its redemption arc

The story of the Rabbit R1 is a cautionary tale. The AI gadget stole CES 2024, thanks in large part to its cutesy design and Rabbit's promise that it could do nearly everything a smartphone could [...]

Thinking Machines challenges OpenAI's AI scaling strategy: 'First superintelligence will be a superhuman learner'

While the world's leading artificial intelligence companies race to build ever-larger models, betting billions that scale alone will unlock artificial general intelligence, a researcher at one of [...]

Project Hail Mary could teach humanity a thing or two

It's hard not to find the premise of Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary instantly compelling: Something is slowly killing the sun and threatening life on Earth. That same mysterious force, dubbed [...]

This Star Wars Droid Follows You Around to Carry Your Bag for $2,875

The new Gita Mini acts and sounds like a Star Wars astromech droid, but it can't co-pilot spacecraft. [...]